


hardest universe to swallow

by Ahavaa



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:49:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25948357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahavaa/pseuds/Ahavaa
Summary: DC: okay, we set up basically infinite ridiculous alternate worlds and time travel nonsense, but what if we condensed it to to one world with strict rules? is that what you like? surely this will be more fun?me: anyways, terrible idea, but you're saying now one dude is stuck with the bajillion memories of all his other selves and that sucks a lot. What do you mean 1/1 chapters, this is gonna get weird and comprehensive.  I can compromise.
Relationships: Barry Allen/Eobard Thawne, Tess Morgan/Original Harrison Wells
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	hardest universe to swallow

_scientific, anachronistic_

Nash dreams. He'd call them the high points of all these Welles' lives, but half the time they're pedestrian. Lazy. Boring. A blond woman laughing, no treasure, no goal in sight. Eating fries while someone pressed a bony shoulder into his side. 

_Nash Wells dreams._

He and Tess go for a drive. They drink good wine in the golden light by the water, and he thinks yes, you: yes, this, _yes yes yes._

The drive home is uneventful. He's a little tipsy, still, but it doesn't matter. 

He unlocks the door, and Tess straddles him, lazy, sweet, her edges blunted by the sun and the wine and what they can do, together. What they'll build, and what they're becoming. 

Ten years later, she laughs, and she smells like whiskey, and her eyes are shining: "Someone's got a crush," she hums.

"Me," he says. "How'd you guess? You make me --"

She dodges once, and then she's pressing him up against the wall, and he can't look away from her face, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the sweet, thoughtful tilt to her mouth. "Hartley Rathaway is a genius, and he has excellent taste in men," she says, and her lips are warm against the corner of his mouth. "Still. First come, etc. I found it, I think I'll keep it." 

He goes still, because this isn't something that they've talked about, not out loud, and he hadn't -- Hartley was young, and he had a bad case of hero worship, underneath the vicious shell of sneering barbs, which wasted so much time, sometimes he wanted to shake the kid, he _wasted so much time_ sneering at people -- 

"Oh god," Tess says, and she buries her face in his chest, sweet and hot and innocent all at once. "Not the bluescreen of death, I didn't mean to break you. He's young," she says, more seriously, "and he worships you. Which means that you have to invite him for dinner immediately, so he can see you ball up your socks in the living room and leave them there, like an animal." 

"You're inciting a mutiny," he says.

She winks, touches her nose.

"You insist on hiring wide-eyed grad students! Someone has to keep you from turning STAR Labs into a cult. No cheating, either."

"I wouldn't call Hartley a wide-eyed anything," he says, because it's true, and because it will make her laugh. 

Hartley walks in ready to get his back against a wall, already bristling like a cat. "It's an Opus One 2012, " he starts. 

"Pretty much any wine pairs with burgers and fries," Tess says, and her tone is nearly as dry as the wine itsslf. She pulls Hartley close. "I'm the one who keeps this team from getting scurvy," she says, low, friendly, and Hartley stares at her like he's lost his place in the world when she kisses his cheek, high, on the bone. 

Twenty years later, they bring the particle accelerator online. It goes off without a hitch, and he brushes Tess's grey-streaked blonde hair out of her face, kisses her in front of God and fate and the paparazzi, thinking: _yes._ You and me, together. 

That's not a bad dream. It's achingly sweet, for all that the people in it are strangers. 

_Nash dreams._

Thirty years before that he, he watches Tess die while a monster steals his body, and that echo of wirefire burns itself into his nerves, twists the magnetic poles: Allen is the new north, and he won't forget this, won't ever shake it. 

_Nash dreams._

He would do anything. He will do anything, anything at all. It's his daughter on the line, and everything else is thin, pale, barely there. 

This dream feels most familiar, most like _him_ as he knows himself.

It's bitter, crisp and familiar. 

The other dreams are sleepy puppet shows of another man's life, over and over, but this is close enough to serve as his own shadow, and he hates it.

_Nash dreams._

Barry Allen kisses him like he means to feed the thin lines of desperation knotting them together.

He thinks of his home, waiting to bloom into existence, and how it's nothing like this, nothing like STAR Labs, wound around him like ivy, forcing roots into his beating, shrapnel-studded heart. It's enough to make any man choke. 

Instead, he catches Barry Allen by the throat, pushes him back into one lean, mathematically precise curve, bowed beneath him. 

Open your eyes, he thinks, open your eyes, damn you, you will --

Barry Allen is fighting, face red, temples damp with sweat -- _good_ , he wants him to work for it, wants him to struggle under his fingers, wants to feel the heavy thump of blood pushing past his grip in unsteady, starving beats, yes, that desperate rhythm --  


\-- and Barry opens his eyes, green and then gold and then brown with burnt lightning, blood on his face, in his teeth -- 

Can't stop the honest pride from blooming in his face when Barry flips them, locking the cuffs in place. 

It's always a plain shock to grind to a halt, to be forced away from the lightning, and yet. Barry is still riding the wave of it and it's elemental, lightning sparking in his eyes, sizzling in the fillings in his clenched jaw. 

He means it, doesn't care who's listening, Barry or the Speed Force, one or both, together, when he says "you'll let me back in. You know you can't keep me out." 

He's not sure what answers him, but it's laughing when it does, untamed and heartbroken and as familiar to him as his own right hand. 

_Nash, awake_.

Before the crisis, Nash had looked -- of course he had. Pretty man, fantastic legs, reeking of hurt and desperation. Well. What did you expect? Of course he'd looked at Barry Allen, but the man had eyes for nothing but his wife, his family. 

All the damn Welles', though. 

All the _adrenaline_ , like they'd save the world, like they could save worlds, as if there were worlds left to save, in this kaleidoscoping nightmare of a dream -- 

\-- when really, what could they give? 

Half a dozen Star Labs decimated, charred and destroyed, gutted to their stark, neon bones, half a dozen monsters for every world, -- 

\-- and Barry Allen. Blood-red, alive, and laughing.

**Author's Note:**

> me: i love writing about superheroes 
> 
> also me: anyone with a broken heart who has superpowers is a horror story about to happen


End file.
